Hassall-Free Fridays | The admissions process culture gap

My high-school education taught me a lot of things. How the human heart works and how to calculate derivatives. How to sing in Latin and perform Maori war dances (No, I will not demonstrate either). It taught me everything I needed to know to succeed at university in New Zealand, and a lot of what I’d need to be successful in life thereafter. But then I decided I wanted to come to the United States for college and realized my high school had taught me shockingly little of what I was expected to know.

Now let’s be clear: I’m not talking about academics. I’ve never found that my prior education disadvantaged me in the classroom here. What my education failed to prepare me for was not college, but college admissions.

Think about everything you did in school for the sake of admissions: standardized-test prep courses, extracurricular activities galore, preparation and assistance in the drafting of your application essays. Now imagine the process without any of that. Imagine never taking a standardized test for anything, ever. Imagine a high school where non-sporting extracurricular opportunities barely existed. Imagine a school where not only did nobody help you with admissions essays, but the very idea of writing them — all of which essentially boil down to “here is how much of a special little blueberry I am” — was completely outside your cultural frame of reference. Welcome to my college admissions process.

In New Zealand, the only things considered in your admissions are your grades. There are no admissions committees — only admissions standards that you either meet or don’t. No essays, no SATs, no references. Some of you may have spent weeks of your lives preparing applications to some relatively middle-ranked schools in the United States. Now observe that all of you could easily have gotten into the University of Auckland, ranked 68th in the world, based simply on your high-school grades. And it would have been several orders cheaper.

This is the burden many international applicants face. Unless you were educated at an international school that specifically geared its students toward education in the United States., you likely had this problem. Classical Studies professor Cameron Grey, like me an esteemed Old Boy of Auckland’s King’s College, noted by e-mail that “the admissions merry-go-round is, similarly, completely unique, particularly the overwhelming impulse to find ‘extras’ that will enhance an already academically impressive resume,” and that this difference likely disadvantaged international applicants. It is a massive disincentive to apply, and many people I knew in high school avoided applying to the United States specifically because they weren’t interested in padding their resumes.

I suspect the long-term implications may be to the disadvantage of schools like Penn. In an increasingly global race for the top college talent, students right now are still eager to pursue a U.S. education. But for how long will that be true? U.S. education costs continue to balloon uncontrollably, and many international students find other schools in other countries can offer them a cheaper education at the same level of quality, with less hoops to jump through. Schools that won’t care that you didn’t take debate so long as you got enough As.

America has a lot to teach the world. There is value in considering the wider perspective on college applicants, something that simply never occurs in many nations abroad. But the balance has now gone too far in the other direction. It’s time for U.S. schools to recognize that the most important part of an academic application is academics. That the current organization of U.S. high schools means anyone can rack up leadership roles in a couple of clubs, anyone can game the SAT and anyone can be taught to write a good application essay. And those abilities shouldn’t have anything to do with Penn.

Luke Hassall is a College senior from Auckland, New Zealand. His e-mail address is hassall@theDP.com. Hassall-Free Fridays appears on alternate Fridays.

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